3 Videos Elearning Designers Should Watch If They Want To Connect Retail Employees With Those They Serve

I wanted to make this short, sweet,…and powerful.

And, what better way to do that than with content from smarter people?

Anywho. The three videos below resonated with me… and I’m sure will probably resonate with you too.

Why? Because if you watch these videos, and in the following order, they’ll move you in the right direction if you’re looking to design practical, results-oriented elearning (and improve the online learning experience.)

The first video talks about storytelling and how it can change your behavior by changing your brain chemestry. Very powerful stuff.

The second video talks about interactive visual narrative. (And how you can apply what you learned from the first video to boost learner engagement.)
And lastly,…

The third video unites the concepts of video one and video two to form the megapowerful elearning.

Each video may seem obvious on its own, but watching them together will open your eyes to incredible new opportunities.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s the three videos I carefully selected for your intellectual entertainment:

1. Paul Zack: Empathy, Neurochemistry, and the Dramatic Arc

“What we’re seeing is that this narrative is changing behavior by changing our brain chemistry.”

“So we began to investigate this story further. We used functional brain imaging to identify the regions of the brain that were most active while watching that video compared to a control video (in which Ben and his father are at the zoo) […] And, guess what happens when you watch 100 seconds of a father and son at the zoo? Nothing happens. And people just blank out. There’s no reason for them to attend to this information because nothing’s happening there’s nothing exciting.”

(MY NOTES: Paul’s research clearly shows how story elements can A) help adults understand what others are doing and, B) help adults feel empathy—which is great for interpersonal skills training. An immense opportunity for online learning.)

“Stories are powerful because they transport us into other people’s worlds. But in doing that, they change the way our brains work. And potentially change our brain chemistry. And that’s what it means to be a social creature. Is to connect to others, to care about others — even complete strangers. And it’s so interesting that dramatic stories cause us to do this.”

2. Karrie Fransman: Why We Should Be Taking Comics More Seriously

“The British Red Cross gave comics a chance and saw how they were able to create a new story and spread their story to a new audience. And it is my hope that more people will start to take the medium of comics more seriously.”

“There’s something incredibly important about telling stories in pictures—about organizing our messy and complicated lives into panels, and frames, and scenes and displaying them sequentially across the page … to kind of make sense and create our own narratives. Much like the cavemen used to take moments of their time and display them sequentially across the cave wall.”

3. Anna Sabramowicz: Scenario Formula of Comic Book Style E-Learning

“So, what we’ve got here is quite simply a set up with some sort of problem or situation…A bunch of options to address that problem (resolve it somehow). And then, what happens is, once you choose one of those options you get a consequence. You don’t get feedback and that’s the beauty of of this. The reason it’s called a mini scenario is that you don’t actually get feedback right away about whether you’re right or wrong. You get the consequences, the results of your actions.”

P.S. I found this in Harvard Business Review:

“Connection happens when you see past the details of a task to its human consequences. […] Most storytelling is brief. It involves using concrete examples that reframe a moment by personifying human consequences.”
— Great Storytelling Connects Employees to Their Work, Harvard Business Review